HCM Processes & Forms: It ain’t over till it’s over….and you give the user a nice Confirmation page!

     Episode #483 in my continuing journey to discover just how many HCM Processes & Forms blogs I can actually create! (haha) No actually, it occurred to me the other day that I have not even mentioned or ever touched upon one of the little discussed, often overlooked, “newer” functionality that allows us to present a completely custom “Confirmation” page to the user. For us doing HCM P&F, we are just happy when we see that “stock” confirmation page at all. “YES!!!! It finally works!!!” usually accompanies that page displaying for the first time. 😆 But there is actually more….MUCH more….possible now!

     If you are familiar with HCM P&F, then you are also familiar with getting to the end of the “start-check-send” chain (or “edit-check-send” or “approve” or whatever) and getting the very basic of web pages displayed back to you like this….

    But what if I told you that is very easy to do so much more like this…

   Ok….maybe you will not have such “creative freedom” as I did in this example (haha), but you get the idea. In fact, you can add formatted text, images, video, and pretty much anything under the sun that you could embed into any web page.

     This is all possible via a little update almost silently sneaked in with the HR Renewal 1.0 update. In the “Design Time” tool (HRASR_DT), you simply go to the form scenario’s “Scenario Steps” configuration area. You will notice that along with the other information you can define for a scenario step (name, attachments, links, etc.), you will have the option for “Confirmation Txt” (I guess putting that “e” in the second word was too much work or they needed the screen space haha).

Clicking this area will bring up the “editor” for you.

Here, you can define/edit/add your own custom confirmation “text”. Per the documentation:

The text editor provides you with XML formatting. You can include, for example, hyperlinks, images, and structured lists, as well as a number of XML tags. For more information on the formatting available to you in this editor, see the SAP NetWeaver Library under Web Dynpro ABAP Reference User Interface Elements Text Category FormattedTextView

Here is a nice list of supported tags: Supported Tags –  Web Dynpro ABAP – SAP Library

     Personally, I think it is pretty cool that you can have different “text” for different steps/users along the way in a process. The downside is that if you have a custom confirmation “layout” used in many processes and you want to make a change, there is no central way to change/organize/maintain this. Since this feature itself is used so very little, I do not know if SAP will bother putting the time into it. I know this is “crazy talk”, but I think it would be nice if it could be managed/maintained much like our “additional links” are (i.e. define once, use in multiple processes). At least for now, SAP has made it a bit easier in that you can simply upload a “local” file with your changes (you can export/download, make changes, re-upload to any/all affected process form scenario steps).

     Now if it were really all that easy……there a “few” OSS Notes to be aware of concerning this:

     Also, while putting this together, I believe I found another “bug”. When I made my first custom text, it showed fine. But if I changed it, the changes were not reflected. In fact, it reverted back to the old “static” screen and ignored my custom text all together! ARGGGG!!!! For my second example, I had to go change a different form scenario step to see it working. Not fun, SAP….not fun, at all. 😛

     Well, that is all for now I suppose…..another episode all wrapped up! (haha) I hope this helps. Maybe it even helped spark an idea  or two in a few of you, and you go out now and create your own custom confirmation pages to “wow” your end users. One can dream eh? (haha) As always….till next time.